Benchmarks: Samsung Galaxy Note II vs Apple iPhone 5

The numbers behind the top high-end smartphones of the moment.

By Eric van BallegoieTuesday 2 October 2012 09:13

Introduction

Samsung's new flagship phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note II, became available yesterday. Hardware.Info put Samsung's latest Android device next to Apple's iPhone 5 to find out how the current top-of-the-line smart phones compare to each other. Samsung is positioning the Galaxy Note II above the Galaxy S III. They both have the same quad-core Exynos 4412 processor, but in the Note II it runs at 1600 MHz instead of 1400 MHz. The GPU has also been boosted from 400 to 533 MHz, and the RAM was increased from 1 GB to 2 GB. These hardware improvements should provide a noticeable performance-increase.

Apple iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy Note II, image to scale

It's still too early for a full review, but it is interesting to find out how the Samsung Galaxy Note II compares to Apple's new iPhone 5. It's challenging to compare the two since they run on two different operating systems, but a number of benchmark programs are available for both Android and iOS.

So here they are, the cold, hard numbers behind Samsung's and Apple's latest pride and joy. We will look at the performance of the browsers, 3D rendering, and the performance of the processors and memory.

Browser performance

The first three benchmarks are browser benchmarks, run on the default browser of the phone. On the Apple iPhone 5 that's Safari, and on the Samsung Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S III it's a webkit browser.

The iPhone 5 takes the lead in all three benchmarks, followed by the Note II and the Galaxy S III a bit further off.